“I can see we’re goin’ to find out something if we stay near you,” ventured Phil.
“I’m sure I can think of no more agreeable companions,” returned Captain Ludington with a smile which fixed him fast in the hearts of both boys.
“And where’d you see these glacier waters?” persisted Frank.
“I’ve been in America only once before,” explained the captain as he helped himself to a thin little cigar from a gold case, “and that was about four years ago, while on a quick mission home by way of the Pacific. I traveled through Canada and stopped a few days in the heart of the Canadian Rockies—at the foot of the Great Glacier of the Selkirks. Here, surrounded by mountains towering eleven thousand feet in the air; listening to the rush and play of the glacier streams cooled by never melting snows, I heard the story of the Bighorn and the snow white goat. I was led along dizzy heights and shown where, for three hundred miles, this wilderness of peak and crag led to the south. Between the snowy ranges, I was told, great streams and riverlike lakes led to the distant United States. And in this land—one of Nature’s solitudes—the Bighorn sheep and the ebon-horned goat have made their last stand. In a few years the flag of the railway engineer will have marked their end. Fortunately,” concluded the captain, “we shall precede him.”
This was the sort of talk that pleased poetical Frank. More practical Phil did not give way to sentiment so easily.
“Well, what are they like if they aren’t like common sheep and goats?”
“The Bighorn sheep,” answered Captain Ludington, “is known in the books as Ovis Canadensis and the goat is called by zoölogists, Oreamnus Montanus. The latter isn’t a goat at all. It is really an antelope and is related, in a way, to the chamois.”
“Where the skins come from?” suggested Phil.
Neither Captain Ludington nor Frank seemed to think this especially funny and the military man continued.
“There isn’t much question but what these animals reached this continent from Asia by way of Bering strait, for we have animals much like them in the Himalayas. In America they are most commonly found in Alaska and British Columbia. But, according to old hunters, fifty years ago they had penetrated the United States as far as Idaho. Old horns are yet found in the mountains of that state and Montana, but now the greatest herds of each seem to have collected in the Selkirk and Purcell Mountains south of the Great Selkirk glacier, and along the United States boundary line.”